When notebookLM was new, it was interesting to listen to the podcasts. Then the novelty wore off, and I wanted something where I can interact with the podcasters but it was janky as hell.
My current “audio-learning” hack is ChatGPT Live which has become shockingly good after being awful compared to Claude Voice
(Let’s not even talk about Gemini voice which is still bad).
I go on a walk and dump a paper or article link in the chat, and ask chatGPT Live to walk me through the content in small nuggets, so I can discuss them interactively. For deeper topics I have it quiz me Socratic style so I’m not just passively listening, and actually thinking through problems or ideas.
Ok so I'm going on a walk. I'll dump a link to a Hacker News
discussion about an article.
You have to read the article and the discussion and walk me thru
all the interesting details, nugget by nugget, and move on when
I'm ready for the next piece.
ChatGPT Live:
ok, Great show me the link, I'm waiting.
(I paste the link)
Me:
Ok I pasted it. Now go.
====
For the Socratic quiz I say:
I want to understand this more deeply. So instead of you just telling me
everything, lay out the problem and a question for me to think about, and
I'll try to answer. Even if I answer wrong, you should resist giving me the
answer, and instead keep digging with more questions, so that I eventually
arrive at the answer myself.
I also have a Socratic quiz skill that I wrote for using in Claude Code or Codex
to understand implementations/architecture etc:
To each their own, but for me - that'd be a heavy cognitive load. I ask Claude or ChatGPT to summarize HN comments and the article and provide any takeaways or wisdom nuggets. That's it.
Actually for me it’s more cognitive load when the AI just dumps everything at once, which is why I prefer to have it give me a nugget at a time, so I can take it in, pause and discuss before moving to the next one.
Nice, it works for discussing concepts baked into the LLM but fails when you want it to read contents of an article or do web search. ChatGPT Live doesn’t have this limitation. Their Voice mode did have this limitation, but the Live mode released a couple weeks ago works exactly as you’d want, with link-following and web search
there is a very good reason microsoft's ceo got repeatedly dunked on and it was because he literally couldn't stop babbling incoherently about having AI listen to things for him
i cannot imagine just sucking the joy out of life like this.
what do you think will come of the people who have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy, if the AI is ingesting large amounts of information for them?
and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about?
why be snarky? i agree, your AI is going to make the tedium in your job easier.
The limit of these things being at least partially due to the users’ imagination explains at least some of the terrible criticisms I see out there which do not stand up to scrutiny. Perfect example just now in the wild: https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&...
anyway, your idea is sweet, likely because you are smart
There is actually an interrupt mode in NotebookLM now.
Overall I've found it the best AI product Google have. Only complaint I have about it is the hyper positive US corporate accents get pretty annoying pretty quickly.
The realtime voice in ChatGPT is excellent, the newer model is a big step up too.
I wonder how much of the annoying aspects of the podcasters can be controlled by the custom user instructions. I hate sitting through the patter of how "we're not political, just reporting the views of the sources."
Yeah I think the podcasts were just a clever hack until AI is fast enough to support realtime. It’s practically there now, so a fake podcast is a funny relic and hard to sit through.
This was my main problem with it. Loved it otherwise, but the lack of an API or other automation so I could dump stuff in it and have a podcast ready to download and listen to on my subway ride made me turn away.
Moving mind in a moving body. Maybe the future of coding really is a philosophical debate with a dhjinn.. i like this a lot. bravo.
I actually can see this as advertisement USP. Some lone hiker going up a mountain through nature to a peak, while the city in the valley below far away becomes functional again because of what is said in that debate about ..
walking for ideas - hunted down savanna mode similar to Darwin and all the other old thinkers.
lets expand on this idea.. augment reality overlay showing the resulting code in what you are looking at.. persistence is the ground.. model + business logic is the surroundings.. API is in the clouds..
Actually would pair better with functional programming.. as in the flow of the data - all those filter and mappers.. would fit well into the way you walk upon. But what is the center of your viewpoint and the center of attention, while you are moving. You would need to have a modal mode.. one where you move through the code structure by walking and/or looking and one - where the center is stationary, even while you move.
Yes Claude voice refuses to actually read the article and relies on snippets it finds in web searches and often pretends to have read the article, and when pushed admits it really didn’t. ChatGPT Voice used to have this issue as well, but the new Live mode (released just a few weeks ago) fixed all that, and it actually pauses and reads the article and does real web searches during the conversation.
I never got into the podcasts side but it was good for synthesizing multiple documents in a way chatgpt or google's ai overview couldn't, but now I will just dump a couple PDFs into a new chat in Ollama and then ask it questions about the content. Is there another killer app for notebookLM out there?
I can’t believe how bad Claude’s voice mode is. So much latency and it often tells me “this is rather technical” and would be better talking it out over text.
OpenAI has much less latency, can adapt to speak about any topic (though will tell you it put a code sample to look at later), and it just feels like brainstorming with a colleague.
If you haven’t tried the live voice version of ChatGPT recently, you should. I love to brainstorm ideas while on walks and it’s fabulous for that.
Ask it to summarize the conversation into a doc that will be waiting for you when you are back at your desk.
Is there a way to make the ChatGPT live experience less dumbed down?
It just wants to stay at a superficial level, while annoyingly mimicking human traits like “hmmms” and “umms”
I’ve found the better approach is to dictate into the text version and have it read the response. The responses are way better, so long as they don’t contain a table.
I like the podcast features still for getting an overview or orientation on a new topic where I know I need a big context dump before I can begin to do anything under my own speed.
I have tried the "walk and talk" pattern with AI, and it's okay, but I find that it can be kind of janky if the network connection isn't very good. And I find it very frustrating to use still in terms of how the interrupt feature works. For example, if I'm out hiking and there's even a little bit of wind, the voice mode of ChatGPT and Gemini both will think that I'm done talking and begin responding.
In fairness to the AI vendors, I imagine that this is a very difficult thing to get right. Humans have a very natural sense of flow in conversation, and knowing when a speaker is done talking and it's appropriate to begin responding.
I've been working on https://notebooker.ai if anyone is interested in giving some feedback. I tried to post a Show HN yesterday with details about how I built it, but was auto-flagged and not sure what rules I broke. Everything that I've built on top of open-notebook, like the plugin system for your own "creators" (aka, podcasts, infographics, etc) is at https://github.com/Notebooker-ai plus a Cloudflare Worker AI deployer to play with different models. Been working on it for about six months.
I wondered when the name change was coming as NotebookLM felt a bit out of place brand-wise. Still would have been killer if they called it "Bard Notebook"
Got burned by this when I was wanting to uninstall MS Office from my laptop recently.
Filtering with string "office" turned up nothing in the list of installed programs but it was clear that "MS Office Click-to-Run SxS" was regularly grinding away chewing lots of CPU. So I was not crazy -- Office was installed.
The names of the "installed program" for MS Office is now Microsoft 365. Brilliant value add on that one </sarc>
Their current product naming is still terrible.They went from the Xbox, to the Xbox 360, the Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X.
Mitch Hedberg... "I want to get a job at the Kitchen Appliance Naming Institute: Refrigerator, Toaster, Blender.. you just say say what it does, then you add '-er' What's this thing do? It keeps shit fresh. Well that's a fresher. I'm goin on break."
"""AI Overview: No, the Asus ROG Ally is not actually an Xbox. It is a handheld Windows computer made by Asus, even though it features Xbox branding and uses an Xbox-style controller layout"""
It basically already is if you're not playing live service. Unfortunately I can't see MS ever making their catalogue of games workable with Proton, Riot won't as well since they won't budge on kernel level anti-cheat, and for God knows what reason Epic won't do so either (even though they're always pushing for open platforms???)
I’ve noticed a lot of big corporations doing this and I think the reasoning behind it is it’s really easy to say you shipped a product on your résumé. If all you did was change the name of it. It actually takes a lot of work and time to ship a new innovative product.
Any people with insight on why this happens? From my corporate experience this generally happens when two teams are working on a similar thing, they complain about turf to leadership, and leadership either makes them consolidate efforts or chooses a winner. Is that what happens at Google a lot? Or do they just constantly tweak things to the point they cease to live or be used?
I've always attributed this sort of thing to companies outgrowing any form of manageable structure. At a scale like google, each team gets so distant from various parts of other parts of the company and the management structure gets so deep that the whole thing kinda becomes a zombie. Each part is kinda stuck in its own myopic view of the world with no oversight. Like, if you had an org where the only thing you made was AI tools, you would probably have common branding and the CEO would spend real time trying to get the naming right, but Sundar probably forgets they even made Notebook LM.
Eventually, if something makes news or when they try to trim offerings, suddenly the company can focus on it and then does course corrections.
Something of note is that this is now the third name for this product, the first name was impressively bad and so myopic that it feels kinda hilarious.
They wanted to call it Tailwind. Like the #1 CSS framework on earth.
Sundar did know about all the chat apps though. It's one thing to have internally competing things, but that shouldn't be exposed to end users. I never had a lot of confidence in his leadership either, seemed like autopilot.
Google seems to have competing orgs especially when something becomes a company-wide priority. Before it was chat apps, now it's AI. Idk if it's intentional, but it did seem that way with Jetski vs Gemini CLI, where they decided Jetski was better and nixed the other. Also ChromeOS vs Android.
And it was replaced (I expect, don’t know for sure) because GeminiCLI was built on a code base and language that didn’t scale in performance for what people were doing.
I know Gemini CLI was written in JS + React. Even the public version had a very slow startup time that some might blame on the stack. But Claude CLI is a similar stack and starts instantly, so idk, does Bun really make the difference?
Internally I didn't like Gemini CLI just because it didn't have the right skills/whatever preinstalled, so it always did stuff that made sense elsewhere but not at Google, like trying to grep through the entire monorepo. Jetski just worked.
I've seen this sort of thing happen when something starts small and no one cares and then it gets traction. Eg: If you have a tiny toy project that the engineers call one thing, you might publish it under that name. If it then gets the attention of some higher level marketing team, you might rebrand it to align with the rest of the company.
No idea if that happened here or in google generally.
I would imagine it's just a branding/marketing thing so that the product is directly associated by consumers as being within the Gemini ecosystem (and thus Google) from the product name alone. NotebookLM doesn't convey that, but Gemini Notebook does.
You are evaluated by launches. If you have nothing of substance to launch, then launch a rebrand.
It is a sign of an organization that has nothing of substance to show off. Sadly, that's where Google is now: while its competitors are busy launching new features and improved models, Sir Demis' merry band of pranksters is busy renaming and rebranding things.
In my experience (since Notebook is still in the name), you're going to get the same emails as before, now with additional people confused about the change and what it means for them.
It seems Google is repeating it's mistakes of chat apps (they had gazillions of those at some point) with AI. There are just way too many tools that they are pushing. And none of them address the glaring issue that most of their users end up using Codex or Claude Cowork instead. Google is failing hard at convincing their own users that they are as good. They seem to have a lot of fragmented efforts that don't really add up to good enough.
“It seems Google is repeating its mistakes of chat apps (they had gazillions of those at some point) with AI.”
It’s just a product of how Google is organized, it’s very distributed with less top down product management than other organizations.
It’s interesting that they still haven’t seen reason enough to fix this, I can only assume it works well for them in other ways.
“Google is failing hard at convincing their own users that they are as good.”
It’s interesting as they very quickly caught up after their own “code red” a few years back, and ever since seem to be going full Google and fragmenting themselves into irrelevance.
They do have their tensor processors, though, so they have a huge advantage there.
I fear the upcoming changes... It ALWAYS starts with a name change, then more useless features, more ensh*ttification, then users flee, then the product is killed.
Allo, Google Talk, Hangouts Chat (not the same as Hangouts), "Meet (original)", idk maybe some other thing called Google Chat that isn't the new Google Chat, uhh my Android phone has 2 "Messages" apps so one of them is probably deprecated?
I think the real value of NotebookLM was never the podcast itself. It was making long documents feel approachable. Once voice becomes interactive instead of one-way, it starts feeling less like a podcast and more like having partner.
I used it to listen to a high level walkthrough of interesting and entertaining code while driving to work.
Of course I then read the source myself afterwards.
So far I have used it for the Plan 9 C code for ed and for the C source for Karpathy's toy llm. I plan to use it later today for the ed source from Unix Ver 1 in the original PDP 7 assembly code.
Hearing it talk about Ken Thompson's bit stealing trick was enlightening.
Since I am not a C programmer, getting a bird's eye view first is useful.
While all the other AI labs are releasing new models weekly or monthly...we have Google here busy renaming their AI products (NotebookLM -> Gemini Notebook, and Gemini CLI -> Antigravity CLI)
Does anyone know when notebook llm will be able to accept all file types?
I've got round it for understanding small repos by copying and pasting in the files as text. But not possible for big repos
I admonish Gemini and demand explanation nearly every day of how it's possible that Google invented the thing, has the best infrastructure for inference, and somehow falls behind Anthropic and even OpenAI.
NotebookLM is pretty cool since it can hold a ton of context but this is so far below my (and frankly just reasonable) expectations of Google.
I downgraded my Gemini subscription and got Claude. Still can't believe how much better it is. Fable is way better, that's a given. But Claude even has a real .deb repo. Something Antigravity had and managed to lose.
Antigravity sucks so bad that I have started to feel that google really doesn't wanna compete, they just wanna hang in there at number 2 or 3, to just annoy the number 1 and 2.
For coding, I don't think they're even number 3, anymore. Seems more like 4th or 5th (unbelievably, even Mecha Hitler seems to do better, though I'm hopeful Gemini 3.5 Pro will turn things around).
I tried Antigravity recently with Flash 3.5, and it got stuck in a loop saying the same sentence over and over. I haven't seen this pathological behavior from other LLMs in months.
I share your sentiment. I'm still paying for Gemini but it's almost useless to me. Google has some serious internal problems. Perhaps Gemini is merely being plagued by aggressive cost controls, or perhaps there are deeper flaws in Google’s approach. Either way, I can't trust NotebookLM with serious work and have stopped using it.
Apple is placing a major bet on Google and Gemini for iOS 27. If Gemini's decline is any indication of what's to come, Apple could be in serious trouble in six month's time.
I suspect it is part leadership change (sundar/kurain) and over indexing on Ai for doing the job on top of a model that is just not as good (esp flash 3.5). Google Cloud / Gemini Enterprise sent me the greatest Slop Deck of all time. It was quite obvious it was Ai generated and the rep had only read a few slides of the 30+. I wonder if they are even aware after losing the sale
Also enshittification is slowly starting. Yesterday I asked Gemini (in the Android app) for a recommendation for an app for sound recording. Instead of it answering I got a popup to allow Gemini access to open the app store (or something like that, I didn't allow it). When I declined it just stopped the conversation. It was actually hard to get it to just reply with a list of apps. And I have an AI subscription with Google!
I was still using Gemini CLI even though Claude is better, just cause of inertia. Then one day it started refusing to work, saying I need to install Antigravity instead. Idk if that's an IDE or has a leaner CLI, but doesn't matter, I'm gone. I don't care how the sausage is made, don't randomly break the thing I'm using.
My response is going to be about Gemini generally and less about NotebookLM.
Google's last frontier model release was Gemini 3.1 Pro, which was in February of this year[1]. At the time, it was ahead of the (at the time) flagship models of Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.2/5.3. From my recollection of the time, it was the best model in the world.
Anthropic released Opus 4.5 Nov '25, 4.6 in Feb '26, 4.7 in April, 4.8 in (late) May. Then Fable in June. 4.7 beat 3.1 Pro on multiple metrics. Fable eats it for breakfast. However, I want to note the 3 month gap between those first two Opus versions.
OpenAI released 5.2 Dec '25, 5.3 Codex Feb '26, 5.3 Instant Mar, 5.4 Mar, 5.5 (late) May, 5.6 July. 5.4 beats 3.1 Pro on agentic benchmarks[2], seems to be similar/losing on non-agentic. 5.5 seems stronger than 3.1 Pro[3].
Gemini 3.5 Pro is alleged to be launching within the week. Why do I type this all out? Because I think Google is getting a bad rap. They are delayed on a frontier release by a month or two and are being regarded as if they cannot release frontier models. I think their last release demonstrates strength and we need to see a weak release before we call them "behind" (in any reasonable sense). These companies swap back and forth constantly. I recall a multi-month span where 2.5 Pro was just the best thing out there by a large margin (in my opinion).
In my experience, Gemini 3.x wasn’t just getting a bad rap, it was significantly worse in practice. It could analyze codebases and report back from a one-shot prompt as good as Claude or Codex but any slightly complex task that carried on for more than a few minutes led to hanging, seemingly infinite loops, and bizarre and nonsensical hallucinations, to the point of being unusable for serious work. The Claude and Codex counterpart models at the time rarely had such issues for the same type and duration of complex work, if at all. To be fair, later Claude especially started having hanging issues as many people noticed but that’s been better recently.
Apparently it is Language Model, as mentioned in the announcement of NotebookLM in 2023 [0].
> Today we’re beginning to roll out Project Tailwind with its new name: NotebookLM, an experimental offering from Google Labs. It’s our endeavor to reimagine what notetaking software might look like if you designed it from scratch knowing that you would have a powerful language model at its core: hence the LM.
It's funny how similar that article's intro is to today's announcement.
I feel like the name reflect the product more. I have been using NotebookLM for studying and really like it. I wonder if with this name change, would there be a major change in Gemini Notebook ?
My problem with NotebookLM was that you had to give it URLs or docs, you couldn't just have it search for docs and then incorporate them into your research.
NotebookLM is genuinely useful for structured research workflows. My concern is not the name. It's whether the "notebook" metaphor survives the rebrand.
Much better name for this well-designed product. I do wish they made it easier to pull in emails. For the one notebook I needed to make, I had to use gyb and mhonarc to retrieve the emails (from GMail), convert them to text and split them in a way that the Notebook would accept.
Claude/ChatGPT still end up making things up when they can't find anything, notebook is much better to 99% reply based on quotes.
But yes a backup is to use Claude and grep, but not quite the same.
I have several projects with lots sources (800+). I mostly work with webpages, papers and youtube videos. It also supports mcp if you want to connect something.
I'd like to have audio overviews of scientific papers, so I can "read" them while I drive. NotebookLM/Gemini Notebook sorta does this, but the two-person podcast format is kind of annoying and it can't pronounce math.
Is there something out there that will do this? I'm sure the right harness around frontier models would make it work.
It could be monologue or dialogue, but it should be less full of verbal "syntactic sugar" than NotebookLM podcasts. More to the point, more detail-oriented, can pronounce math.
Can pronounce math is the real showstopper for me. Last time I tried, NotebookLM would try to say the TeX out loud. Like underscore dollarsign...
It's been sometime I have been using an app called nouswise. I switched right after they added nblm notebooks in Gemini. I knew they cannot stand another app competing with their flagship. But anyway, it do have audio recap and it definitely have way less of "syntactic sugar". I haven't tried but because it's agentic you can ask it to generate a monologue for you. But I assume you should be in deep mode. I so far only used the side bar for this.
Yes- I'm the founder of www.Paper2Audio.com, a text to speech service focused on accurately reading complex docs to you such as research papers. Our free plan lets you generate 56 hours of audio per week, using high quality voices.
Feel free to email if you have any questions or feedback.
Paper2Audio is great - and if you're looking to have more editorial control over the outputs, check out Jellypod. You can choose your hosts, publish it to a website/RSS feed, edit scripts, etc.
Google Illuminate does this. I believe it was actually a precursor to Gemini Notebook. It uses a similar podcast generating model but tuned to keep things more technical and detailed.
Guys google, I know enough people in the company to know how this decision was made, but I must say as a user if you rename or kill another thing I will stop using any Google service I still use.
This might be the one time I might forgive it but guys please don't it's annoying.
When notebookLM was new, it was interesting to listen to the podcasts. Then the novelty wore off, and I wanted something where I can interact with the podcasters but it was janky as hell.
My current “audio-learning” hack is ChatGPT Live which has become shockingly good after being awful compared to Claude Voice (Let’s not even talk about Gemini voice which is still bad).
I go on a walk and dump a paper or article link in the chat, and ask chatGPT Live to walk me through the content in small nuggets, so I can discuss them interactively. For deeper topics I have it quiz me Socratic style so I’m not just passively listening, and actually thinking through problems or ideas.
Oh wow, this is a great idea. Can I ask what your prompt looks like?
Me:
ChatGPT Live:
(I paste the link)
Me:
====
For the Socratic quiz I say:
I also have a Socratic quiz skill that I wrote for using in Claude Code or Codex to understand implementations/architecture etc:
https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...
thanks for sharing! saving this to refer back to this
also saved
To each their own, but for me - that'd be a heavy cognitive load. I ask Claude or ChatGPT to summarize HN comments and the article and provide any takeaways or wisdom nuggets. That's it.
His goal is to learn something. Your goal is to get information. Different scenarios.
Actually for me it’s more cognitive load when the AI just dumps everything at once, which is why I prefer to have it give me a nugget at a time, so I can take it in, pause and discuss before moving to the next one.
> You have to read the article
Nahh - pile in based on the title and what you assume the contents might be.
Did this while on a run for the past few days. The thing / interaction model I’ve been waiting for is here finally.
Thats an excellent idea. I've created https://gemini.google.com/gem/17xMogBqRSc2AtdCC-WRfObgHcceD0... and tested it with a couple conversations and it works great :)
Nice, it works for discussing concepts baked into the LLM but fails when you want it to read contents of an article or do web search. ChatGPT Live doesn’t have this limitation. Their Voice mode did have this limitation, but the Live mode released a couple weeks ago works exactly as you’d want, with link-following and web search
>hack
>podcast slop
>letting the llm do it for you
there is a very good reason microsoft's ceo got repeatedly dunked on and it was because he literally couldn't stop babbling incoherently about having AI listen to things for him
i cannot imagine just sucking the joy out of life like this.
This may come as a surprise, but some people have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy.
what do you think will come of the people who have to ingest large amounts of information for reasons other than producing joy, if the AI is ingesting large amounts of information for them?
and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about?
why be snarky? i agree, your AI is going to make the tedium in your job easier.
Probably nothing good, but that's not the complaint being raised!
> and anyway... the commenter is doing this for joy. so who, really, are you even talking about?
I don't see evidence of that?
you must be this guy
https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&...
They do it for joy when they go on a walk, so perhaps what you find joyful are different than them, not sure why you care.
The limit of these things being at least partially due to the users’ imagination explains at least some of the terrible criticisms I see out there which do not stand up to scrutiny. Perfect example just now in the wild: https://x.com/peregrinepulp/status/2077839461749338560?s=46&...
anyway, your idea is sweet, likely because you are smart
There is actually an interrupt mode in NotebookLM now.
Overall I've found it the best AI product Google have. Only complaint I have about it is the hyper positive US corporate accents get pretty annoying pretty quickly.
The realtime voice in ChatGPT is excellent, the newer model is a big step up too.
I wonder how much of the annoying aspects of the podcasters can be controlled by the custom user instructions. I hate sitting through the patter of how "we're not political, just reporting the views of the sources."
"We have some REALLY interesting sources that we're discussing today"
Yeah I think the podcasts were just a clever hack until AI is fast enough to support realtime. It’s practically there now, so a fake podcast is a funny relic and hard to sit through.
Too much friction in notebookLM - several minutes to make a podcast, and they disappear after a while, and the interrupt feature is super-janky.
> Too much friction in notebookLM
This was my main problem with it. Loved it otherwise, but the lack of an API or other automation so I could dump stuff in it and have a podcast ready to download and listen to on my subway ride made me turn away.
Moving mind in a moving body. Maybe the future of coding really is a philosophical debate with a dhjinn.. i like this a lot. bravo.
I actually can see this as advertisement USP. Some lone hiker going up a mountain through nature to a peak, while the city in the valley below far away becomes functional again because of what is said in that debate about .. walking for ideas - hunted down savanna mode similar to Darwin and all the other old thinkers.
lets expand on this idea.. augment reality overlay showing the resulting code in what you are looking at.. persistence is the ground.. model + business logic is the surroundings.. API is in the clouds..
Actually would pair better with functional programming.. as in the flow of the data - all those filter and mappers.. would fit well into the way you walk upon. But what is the center of your viewpoint and the center of attention, while you are moving. You would need to have a modal mode.. one where you move through the code structure by walking and/or looking and one - where the center is stationary, even while you move.
notebook LM is still much much better at not hallucinating compared to claude and chatgpt.
Yes Claude voice refuses to actually read the article and relies on snippets it finds in web searches and often pretends to have read the article, and when pushed admits it really didn’t. ChatGPT Voice used to have this issue as well, but the new Live mode (released just a few weeks ago) fixed all that, and it actually pauses and reads the article and does real web searches during the conversation.
I never got into the podcasts side but it was good for synthesizing multiple documents in a way chatgpt or google's ai overview couldn't, but now I will just dump a couple PDFs into a new chat in Ollama and then ask it questions about the content. Is there another killer app for notebookLM out there?
I can’t believe how bad Claude’s voice mode is. So much latency and it often tells me “this is rather technical” and would be better talking it out over text.
OpenAI has much less latency, can adapt to speak about any topic (though will tell you it put a code sample to look at later), and it just feels like brainstorming with a colleague.
If you haven’t tried the live voice version of ChatGPT recently, you should. I love to brainstorm ideas while on walks and it’s fabulous for that.
Ask it to summarize the conversation into a doc that will be waiting for you when you are back at your desk.
Is there a way to make the ChatGPT live experience less dumbed down?
It just wants to stay at a superficial level, while annoyingly mimicking human traits like “hmmms” and “umms”
I’ve found the better approach is to dictate into the text version and have it read the response. The responses are way better, so long as they don’t contain a table.
I like the podcast features still for getting an overview or orientation on a new topic where I know I need a big context dump before I can begin to do anything under my own speed.
I have tried the "walk and talk" pattern with AI, and it's okay, but I find that it can be kind of janky if the network connection isn't very good. And I find it very frustrating to use still in terms of how the interrupt feature works. For example, if I'm out hiking and there's even a little bit of wind, the voice mode of ChatGPT and Gemini both will think that I'm done talking and begin responding.
In fairness to the AI vendors, I imagine that this is a very difficult thing to get right. Humans have a very natural sense of flow in conversation, and knowing when a speaker is done talking and it's appropriate to begin responding.
I've been working on https://notebooker.ai if anyone is interested in giving some feedback. I tried to post a Show HN yesterday with details about how I built it, but was auto-flagged and not sure what rules I broke. Everything that I've built on top of open-notebook, like the plugin system for your own "creators" (aka, podcasts, infographics, etc) is at https://github.com/Notebooker-ai plus a Cloudflare Worker AI deployer to play with different models. Been working on it for about six months.
Hi. Most likely you would have been flagged because of login / sign up requirement to try it out which is generally not received very well on HN.
The rules are here (linked at the top of the Show HN page): https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
I agree it's likely the sign-up barrier, but also the button says "Open the web app" and then it doesn't open the web app.
You can email the mods for advice/info on this sort of thing (Contact link at the bottom).
Does "Open the web app" not just redirect you to https://app.notebooker.ai?
I wondered when the name change was coming as NotebookLM felt a bit out of place brand-wise. Still would have been killer if they called it "Bard Notebook"
I wondered when the name change was coming because this is Google: products be endlessly repackaged and renamed, some only to be killed later.
I reckon the same dipshits responsible for Microsoft’s product naming in the early 2000s all moved on to Google to wreak the same havoc there.
Looking at the recent decades-old-brand renaming bonanza with MS Office I'm pretty sure they're still in Redmond.
Got burned by this when I was wanting to uninstall MS Office from my laptop recently.
Filtering with string "office" turned up nothing in the list of installed programs but it was clear that "MS Office Click-to-Run SxS" was regularly grinding away chewing lots of CPU. So I was not crazy -- Office was installed.
The names of the "installed program" for MS Office is now Microsoft 365. Brilliant value add on that one </sarc>
> The names of the "installed program" for MS Office is now Microsoft 365
It's now been renamed "Microsoft 365 Copilot". Not joking.
Their current product naming is still terrible.They went from the Xbox, to the Xbox 360, the Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series X.
The latest console is the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X
I thought that was satire but I've googled it and you're not even joking.
Now search for Microsoft corporation family if products called Copilot
And I bet marketeers got paid a lot of money to come up with those.
Mitch Hedberg... "I want to get a job at the Kitchen Appliance Naming Institute: Refrigerator, Toaster, Blender.. you just say say what it does, then you add '-er' What's this thing do? It keeps shit fresh. Well that's a fresher. I'm goin on break."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lwpS5M7hgA
...and the Ally ISN'T EVEN AN XBOX!!!!
"""AI Overview: No, the Asus ROG Ally is not actually an Xbox. It is a handheld Windows computer made by Asus, even though it features Xbox branding and uses an Xbox-style controller layout"""
"This post is an XBOX"
Obviously it’s an ally, just like the Xbox series x is a series. How much clearer could they be? (Joking).
Let’s be honest, Nintendo are just as bad - new 2DS would like a word.
Gaming’s home deserves to be on Linux.
I know GabeN agrees with me, and he’s worked hard to make it happen.
It basically already is if you're not playing live service. Unfortunately I can't see MS ever making their catalogue of games workable with Proton, Riot won't as well since they won't budge on kernel level anti-cheat, and for God knows what reason Epic won't do so either (even though they're always pushing for open platforms???)
No, no, they’ve all moved over to Salesforce.
I don't speak English at home either, so I hope this helps. It's "products are", not "products be".
i’m thinking it’s an intentional turn of phrase
so for example in native English, if someone upset some people, you might say, just to be creatively different:
“oh boy. people be big mad”
it is an idiom, not necessarily officially part of the language. just saying things in a silly way to be different
“now you’ve done it… People be cryin’!”
I think it might also be an echo of pidgin English/Creole/caribbean English? Would be an interesting language dive. Ask an AI!
It's ebonics, a slang or dialect version of using "are."
And it's more like "are being" here (present imperfect)
Linguistically it's particularly interesting since it marks the habitual aspect, and standard English has no grammatical equivalent.[0]
[0]: https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/invariant-be#who-says-this
sometimes it do be like that
a) This was probably just a typo for "being".
b) Hey but at least you can learn something today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitual_be
I’ve noticed a lot of big corporations doing this and I think the reasoning behind it is it’s really easy to say you shipped a product on your résumé. If all you did was change the name of it. It actually takes a lot of work and time to ship a new innovative product.
openAI just renamed codex to ChatGPT app … I think it is just par for the game.
Banana Paper was on the shortlist
Bard was a great name.
Any people with insight on why this happens? From my corporate experience this generally happens when two teams are working on a similar thing, they complain about turf to leadership, and leadership either makes them consolidate efforts or chooses a winner. Is that what happens at Google a lot? Or do they just constantly tweak things to the point they cease to live or be used?
I've always attributed this sort of thing to companies outgrowing any form of manageable structure. At a scale like google, each team gets so distant from various parts of other parts of the company and the management structure gets so deep that the whole thing kinda becomes a zombie. Each part is kinda stuck in its own myopic view of the world with no oversight. Like, if you had an org where the only thing you made was AI tools, you would probably have common branding and the CEO would spend real time trying to get the naming right, but Sundar probably forgets they even made Notebook LM.
Eventually, if something makes news or when they try to trim offerings, suddenly the company can focus on it and then does course corrections.
Something of note is that this is now the third name for this product, the first name was impressively bad and so myopic that it feels kinda hilarious.
They wanted to call it Tailwind. Like the #1 CSS framework on earth.
Sundar did know about all the chat apps though. It's one thing to have internally competing things, but that shouldn't be exposed to end users. I never had a lot of confidence in his leadership either, seemed like autopilot.
Google seems to have competing orgs especially when something becomes a company-wide priority. Before it was chat apps, now it's AI. Idk if it's intentional, but it did seem that way with Jetski vs Gemini CLI, where they decided Jetski was better and nixed the other. Also ChromeOS vs Android.
Jetski is a code name.
And it was replaced (I expect, don’t know for sure) because GeminiCLI was built on a code base and language that didn’t scale in performance for what people were doing.
I know Gemini CLI was written in JS + React. Even the public version had a very slow startup time that some might blame on the stack. But Claude CLI is a similar stack and starts instantly, so idk, does Bun really make the difference?
Internally I didn't like Gemini CLI just because it didn't have the right skills/whatever preinstalled, so it always did stuff that made sense elsewhere but not at Google, like trying to grep through the entire monorepo. Jetski just worked.
I've seen this sort of thing happen when something starts small and no one cares and then it gets traction. Eg: If you have a tiny toy project that the engineers call one thing, you might publish it under that name. If it then gets the attention of some higher level marketing team, you might rebrand it to align with the rest of the company.
No idea if that happened here or in google generally.
I would imagine it's just a branding/marketing thing so that the product is directly associated by consumers as being within the Gemini ecosystem (and thus Google) from the product name alone. NotebookLM doesn't convey that, but Gemini Notebook does.
You are evaluated by launches. If you have nothing of substance to launch, then launch a rebrand.
It is a sign of an organization that has nothing of substance to show off. Sadly, that's where Google is now: while its competitors are busy launching new features and improved models, Sir Demis' merry band of pranksters is busy renaming and rebranding things.
Very, very, very excited to hopefully stop getting support emails at Notebook.ai for people trying to get help with NotebookLM.
Gemini Notebook is a way better name for the masses.
In my experience (since Notebook is still in the name), you're going to get the same emails as before, now with additional people confused about the change and what it means for them.
It seems Google is repeating it's mistakes of chat apps (they had gazillions of those at some point) with AI. There are just way too many tools that they are pushing. And none of them address the glaring issue that most of their users end up using Codex or Claude Cowork instead. Google is failing hard at convincing their own users that they are as good. They seem to have a lot of fragmented efforts that don't really add up to good enough.
“It seems Google is repeating its mistakes of chat apps (they had gazillions of those at some point) with AI.”
It’s just a product of how Google is organized, it’s very distributed with less top down product management than other organizations.
It’s interesting that they still haven’t seen reason enough to fix this, I can only assume it works well for them in other ways.
“Google is failing hard at convincing their own users that they are as good.”
It’s interesting as they very quickly caught up after their own “code red” a few years back, and ever since seem to be going full Google and fragmenting themselves into irrelevance.
They do have their tensor processors, though, so they have a huge advantage there.
I fear the upcoming changes... It ALWAYS starts with a name change, then more useless features, more ensh*ttification, then users flee, then the product is killed.
Google:
- Hangout
- Chat
- Meets
- Duo
- ...
Allo?
Allo, Google Talk, Hangouts Chat (not the same as Hangouts), "Meet (original)", idk maybe some other thing called Google Chat that isn't the new Google Chat, uhh my Android phone has 2 "Messages" apps so one of them is probably deprecated?
Good article from 2021: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/a-decade-and-a-half-...
Wow that very long series of pivots in the same messaging space is eye-opening and disheartening. It is hard to believe. Thank you for sharing that.
2021 was around the peak of this nonsense. Since then they've tried to clean it up. Well also have been whining about iMessage.
I did use Google Talk at some point back in the day, when I was heavily involved in XMPP-related development and therefore interested in using it too.
The new chat interface in google meets is hilariously bad. Doesn't even load half the time.
Wave. That was more of a tech preview though I guess.
I think the real value of NotebookLM was never the podcast itself. It was making long documents feel approachable. Once voice becomes interactive instead of one-way, it starts feeling less like a podcast and more like having partner.
I used it to listen to a high level walkthrough of interesting and entertaining code while driving to work.
Of course I then read the source myself afterwards.
So far I have used it for the Plan 9 C code for ed and for the C source for Karpathy's toy llm. I plan to use it later today for the ed source from Unix Ver 1 in the original PDP 7 assembly code.
Hearing it talk about Ken Thompson's bit stealing trick was enlightening.
Since I am not a C programmer, getting a bird's eye view first is useful.
While all the other AI labs are releasing new models weekly or monthly...we have Google here busy renaming their AI products (NotebookLM -> Gemini Notebook, and Gemini CLI -> Antigravity CLI)
Does anyone know when notebook llm will be able to accept all file types? I've got round it for understanding small repos by copying and pasting in the files as text. But not possible for big repos
What file type do you need?
python (.py) JavaScript are main but ideally all file types so I can just drop a folder into the notebook and Gemini can go explore.
I think you want Gemini (or any) CLI coding agent for that. Notebook is a consumer web product for documents, it's not made for code repos.
I admonish Gemini and demand explanation nearly every day of how it's possible that Google invented the thing, has the best infrastructure for inference, and somehow falls behind Anthropic and even OpenAI.
NotebookLM is pretty cool since it can hold a ton of context but this is so far below my (and frankly just reasonable) expectations of Google.
I downgraded my Gemini subscription and got Claude. Still can't believe how much better it is. Fable is way better, that's a given. But Claude even has a real .deb repo. Something Antigravity had and managed to lose.
Yeah, it grinds my gears. They could probably have lightning speed inference and the best model if they were interested in doing so.
Antigravity sucks so bad that I have started to feel that google really doesn't wanna compete, they just wanna hang in there at number 2 or 3, to just annoy the number 1 and 2.
For coding, I don't think they're even number 3, anymore. Seems more like 4th or 5th (unbelievably, even Mecha Hitler seems to do better, though I'm hopeful Gemini 3.5 Pro will turn things around).
I tried Antigravity recently with Flash 3.5, and it got stuck in a loop saying the same sentence over and over. I haven't seen this pathological behavior from other LLMs in months.
Fable in Cowork can get stuck in loops, I've had a single prompt use 83% of a session quota on a single prompt before I realized something was amiss.
Its explanation: "the wasted tokens came from re-rendering the document to verify layout after a page-orientation bug."
Fable is very bad at wasting tokens when it comes to doing these renderings and diffs - I had the exact same experience as you.
I recently got a trial for the Google AI Pro subscription and it burned through a week's in a single prompt. Quite impressive for sure.
I share your sentiment. I'm still paying for Gemini but it's almost useless to me. Google has some serious internal problems. Perhaps Gemini is merely being plagued by aggressive cost controls, or perhaps there are deeper flaws in Google’s approach. Either way, I can't trust NotebookLM with serious work and have stopped using it.
Apple is placing a major bet on Google and Gemini for iOS 27. If Gemini's decline is any indication of what's to come, Apple could be in serious trouble in six month's time.
> Google has some serious internal problems.
I suspect it is part leadership change (sundar/kurain) and over indexing on Ai for doing the job on top of a model that is just not as good (esp flash 3.5). Google Cloud / Gemini Enterprise sent me the greatest Slop Deck of all time. It was quite obvious it was Ai generated and the rep had only read a few slides of the 30+. I wonder if they are even aware after losing the sale
Also enshittification is slowly starting. Yesterday I asked Gemini (in the Android app) for a recommendation for an app for sound recording. Instead of it answering I got a popup to allow Gemini access to open the app store (or something like that, I didn't allow it). When I declined it just stopped the conversation. It was actually hard to get it to just reply with a list of apps. And I have an AI subscription with Google!
I was still using Gemini CLI even though Claude is better, just cause of inertia. Then one day it started refusing to work, saying I need to install Antigravity instead. Idk if that's an IDE or has a leaner CLI, but doesn't matter, I'm gone. I don't care how the sausage is made, don't randomly break the thing I'm using.
My response is going to be about Gemini generally and less about NotebookLM.
Google's last frontier model release was Gemini 3.1 Pro, which was in February of this year[1]. At the time, it was ahead of the (at the time) flagship models of Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.2/5.3. From my recollection of the time, it was the best model in the world.
Anthropic released Opus 4.5 Nov '25, 4.6 in Feb '26, 4.7 in April, 4.8 in (late) May. Then Fable in June. 4.7 beat 3.1 Pro on multiple metrics. Fable eats it for breakfast. However, I want to note the 3 month gap between those first two Opus versions.
OpenAI released 5.2 Dec '25, 5.3 Codex Feb '26, 5.3 Instant Mar, 5.4 Mar, 5.5 (late) May, 5.6 July. 5.4 beats 3.1 Pro on agentic benchmarks[2], seems to be similar/losing on non-agentic. 5.5 seems stronger than 3.1 Pro[3].
Gemini 3.5 Pro is alleged to be launching within the week. Why do I type this all out? Because I think Google is getting a bad rap. They are delayed on a frontier release by a month or two and are being regarded as if they cannot release frontier models. I think their last release demonstrates strength and we need to see a weak release before we call them "behind" (in any reasonable sense). These companies swap back and forth constantly. I recall a multi-month span where 2.5 Pro was just the best thing out there by a large margin (in my opinion).
[1]: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...
[2]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-7
[3]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8
I think you have rosy eyed glasses (or never inspected the output too closely), Gemini 3.1 Pro was very bad at hallucinating.
In my experience, Gemini 3.x wasn’t just getting a bad rap, it was significantly worse in practice. It could analyze codebases and report back from a one-shot prompt as good as Claude or Codex but any slightly complex task that carried on for more than a few minutes led to hanging, seemingly infinite loops, and bizarre and nonsensical hallucinations, to the point of being unusable for serious work. The Claude and Codex counterpart models at the time rarely had such issues for the same type and duration of complex work, if at all. To be fair, later Claude especially started having hanging issues as many people noticed but that’s been better recently.
My wild guess is Google isn’t willing to play as dirty as the others wrt data acquisition.
Because naming every product "Copilot" is going so well for Microsoft, I guess?
But they renamed Gemini CLI to Antigravity CLI. And it's worse.
It's not just a rename, they broke the old one.
Not even just broke, they completely disabled people's ability to use it. Took it out behind the woodshed.
That's not a rename, though, Antigravity is a new product.
Google is kinda famous for killing a product and replacing it with a worse one, though, so not very surprising.
I should have said replace.
I was never sure what the "LM" stood for, so this makes sense to me.
Language model?
Large model?
Learning machine?
Apparently it is Language Model, as mentioned in the announcement of NotebookLM in 2023 [0].
> Today we’re beginning to roll out Project Tailwind with its new name: NotebookLM, an experimental offering from Google Labs. It’s our endeavor to reimagine what notetaking software might look like if you designed it from scratch knowing that you would have a powerful language model at its core: hence the LM.
It's funny how similar that article's intro is to today's announcement.
[0] https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/notebook...
I feel like the name reflect the product more. I have been using NotebookLM for studying and really like it. I wonder if with this name change, would there be a major change in Gemini Notebook ?
The backend has changed people experience more hallucinations. You can see their subs.
Who cares they're gonna discontinue it 6 months from now anyway.
Surely it will be called Antigravity Notebook in a few months.
My problem with NotebookLM was that you had to give it URLs or docs, you couldn't just have it search for docs and then incorporate them into your research.
Search for references and ask me if they stop l should be added to my notebook.
Maybe Google can do some search
I used it a couple of days back and they did have a search integration to pull in references. You may want to try this again.
Oh, good. They did add a search capability. It was kind of odd how before NotebookLM wasn't well integrated with Google search at all.
NotebookLM is genuinely useful for structured research workflows. My concern is not the name. It's whether the "notebook" metaphor survives the rebrand.
Give me a recipe for custard pie
Much better name for this well-designed product. I do wish they made it easier to pull in emails. For the one notebook I needed to make, I had to use gyb and mhonarc to retrieve the emails (from GMail), convert them to text and split them in a way that the Notebook would accept.
Incredible how I have not touched a singled AI thing from google for.. probably well over a year at this point. Amazing.
Are there other tools out there like NotebookLM? Not a replacement but some cool AI tools that help people learn.
Or maybe just a way to use chatgpt/Claude with files , and get accurate references to the page/paragraph in the source?
It's cumbersome to have llm duplicate all quotes and still get good response. Else you get no visibility into your sources.
Claude/ChatGPT still end up making things up when they can't find anything, notebook is much better to 99% reply based on quotes. But yes a backup is to use Claude and grep, but not quite the same.
Best closest I stumble on is nouswise. Lets you contain an agent with even more sources and generate almost all outputs.
Like how many sources? And what you mean by sources (tables pdfs...)?
I have several projects with lots sources (800+). I mostly work with webpages, papers and youtube videos. It also supports mcp if you want to connect something.
No pricing, "call for demo". Not sure this is for personal use.
Pricing with a long table comparison for the 3 plans https://nouswise.com/pricing
Are you looking for this?
I use it for personal use. They have 3 plans, 1 free 2 paid.
Microsoft Copilot in the Enterprise has is notebook feature
I reality like notebook LM. MT enterprise Microsoft copilot also has a notebook, similar to Google.
How do you compare different notebooks. Which is the better one?
NorebookLM sounded a little scholastic
NotebookLM got moved one step closer to the abattoir.
DeathNotebook LM goes to Google Graveyard
They probably changed the name because they've been integrating it with the Gemini web page where it now appears on the left above recent chats.
If it's named "Gemini", does that mean it's going to get shoved in your face on every single google-related page/product?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxYUizQrAg8&t=4s
notebookLM is one of the most useful applications on this planet
Not a big deal to be honest. Still works just as great.
Technically not https://www.reddit.com/r/notebooklm/comments/1ss53l5/halluci...
There's a lot of these in their sub.
This Gemini Notebook is apparently different than Notebooks in Gemini (which did not work well as of a few days ago). (https://support.google.com/gemini/answer/16972047?sjid=14524...)
Company run by consultants and MBAs.
I'd like to have audio overviews of scientific papers, so I can "read" them while I drive. NotebookLM/Gemini Notebook sorta does this, but the two-person podcast format is kind of annoying and it can't pronounce math.
Is there something out there that will do this? I'm sure the right harness around frontier models would make it work.
random idea -- driving while you drive?
1) you aren't able to listen to something safely while driving on the highway? 2) the cars pretty much drive themselves on the highway these days
Readwise does this pretty well.
How would the right format for you look like? Specially be monologue?
It could be monologue or dialogue, but it should be less full of verbal "syntactic sugar" than NotebookLM podcasts. More to the point, more detail-oriented, can pronounce math.
Can pronounce math is the real showstopper for me. Last time I tried, NotebookLM would try to say the TeX out loud. Like underscore dollarsign...
It's been sometime I have been using an app called nouswise. I switched right after they added nblm notebooks in Gemini. I knew they cannot stand another app competing with their flagship. But anyway, it do have audio recap and it definitely have way less of "syntactic sugar". I haven't tried but because it's agentic you can ask it to generate a monologue for you. But I assume you should be in deep mode. I so far only used the side bar for this.
Yes- I'm the founder of www.Paper2Audio.com, a text to speech service focused on accurately reading complex docs to you such as research papers. Our free plan lets you generate 56 hours of audio per week, using high quality voices.
Feel free to email if you have any questions or feedback.
Paper2Audio is great - and if you're looking to have more editorial control over the outputs, check out Jellypod. You can choose your hosts, publish it to a website/RSS feed, edit scripts, etc.
Jellypod is great as well!
Google Illuminate does this. I believe it was actually a precursor to Gemini Notebook. It uses a similar podcast generating model but tuned to keep things more technical and detailed.
https://illuminate.google.com/
Why? tho
makes sense!
So now they renamed it to Gemini, it means Google will shut it down soon, right ?
big news
Sure it’s not “Gemini AI Pro Max Duo Notebooks for Workspace Personal”? /s
In a few years, https://killedbygoogle.com/
Years? :-)
Guys google, I know enough people in the company to know how this decision was made, but I must say as a user if you rename or kill another thing I will stop using any Google service I still use.
This might be the one time I might forgive it but guys please don't it's annoying.
They've been doing this kind of thing for at least 15 years
This is the first time it has happened to a tool I use and have helped friends adopt it.
Again I don't condone it but this gets very annoying to explain that everything is renamed now to X instead of Y to your uncles and friends...
Next step, monitize every pixel, result and second into adveristing placement